Who inspires this nation?
Men and women proclaim themselves leaders – in business, politics, civic organizations and even religion. Which one person stands out as the one who brings an inspired message to this generation? Which one figure moves and motivates the nation to believe we can aspire to be a great society?
We miss the kind of dynamic leadership that inspires a nation. As a people present on the world stage as a potential 21st century global citizenry – like India and China and Africa, we absolutely must learn how to create leaders who inspire us upwards.
Our society puts a lot of faith in politics and politicians. And most politicians do what they do because they covet power.
The social order lapses and drifts deformed because we look for the political leaders to fix all the problems and to make us a better people.
However, the one thing we’ve learned since Independence is that political leaders lead us down a path to social chaos, to a divided community. Yet, because we do look to the politicians to solve our social dilemma and take us to the height of greatness as a people, we must work with this primitive culture, which has evolved since Independence. We must seek to transform our environment of politics.
Last week President Bharrat Jagdeo, who as Executive President is not answerable to Parliament, and Opposition Leader Robert Corbin, whose party disrespected Parliament with its role in successive rigged elections, engaged in a verbal slugfest about political power.
While Mr Corbin sees President Jagdeo as coveting hanging on to the powerful Executive Presidential chair, the dour Jagdeo steadily defended his intention to quit office and honour the Constitution.
They traded words of battle, acrimony and strife.
The political leaders fail to inspire our nation because they busy themselves with deep divisions – either defending such divisions, or fostering the structures that keep the people divided, or fighting to erase the divisions. In fact, President Jagdeo emphasised that he wanted no divisions. His focus is on the divide.
So we need to transform the environment in which our politics and politicians live and dwell.
Since Independence, the political parties branded themselves in the emotional landscape of the people, each with a particular message. The People’s Progressive Party became over the years the powerful force that represents and therefore empowers a certain demographic: rural and Indo-ethnic. The People’s National Congress became the power force that empowers the urban and Afro-ethnic communities.
We know of the X-13 plan and that of the US government that started such a culture of political division that has dogged us all these decades. But, now, we must end it.
And to end it we must re-brand these power forces. The Working People’s Alliance tried to erase those brands, but failed to connect with and inspire the nation with its message after Walter Rodney’s tragic assassination.
The time has come for a new message from these power forces that make up our Parliament, to inspire the nation forward, into new thinking and new voting and new vision.
These political forces can start with a total re-branding of their identity. I would suggest the following:
The People’s Progressive Party could re-brand itself as the ‘Progressives’ in the popular imagination. By changing its marketing identity from the highly emotionally charged PPP/C to ‘Progressive’, it would generate a new message: one of progressive government as opposed to the historical connotation of its evolved identity.
The People’s National Congress could re-brand itself as the ‘Congress’, thus erasing its emotional image that triggers the connotation of an Afro-ethnic power.
The Working People’s Alliance may come into its own as the ‘Workers’ Party’ and be able to inspire many more voters with this new message, wrapped in its popular, marketing name. The Alliance For Change could tap into an even deeper psyche in the nation with the popular name of the ‘Alliance’ instead of the aimless, drifting ‘AFC’ acronym.
In other words, a simple re-branding of the linguistic structure that got built up since Independence and came to define the landscape of the political environment could go a far way to renew the nation’s mindset.
Names identify us. And so to choose names that would generate new messages attached to these political forces, would be a way to re-shape the connotation values, the emotional baggage that bogs down the nation in this awful acrimony, division and strife symbolized by the Corbin-Jagdeo verbal slugfest last week.
In this election year, a simple plan to re-brand the environment of our politics could result in a new, workable structure for the landscape of our political ideas to bear good fruits. In a word, we could generate a transformation of our future if our political forces would create new messages and re-brand themselves for these messages to inspire the nation and the electorate. This is, of course, a complex task that requires more than a newspaper column. But here the seed can be planted for such transformational action.
In the developed world, we see political forces brand themselves around a crystal clear message: the Democrats and Republicans of the US; the Liberals, Greens and Conservatives of Canada; and the Conservatives and Labour of England.
I would recommend that our political leaders, of each political force, read a little book called “BrandSimple”, written by Allen P. Adamson. This book outlines the process involved in inspiring people with a message that inspires, that moves one emotionally to take action to create results that work well for everyone.
As Adamson says in his book: “For a brand to be successful it must stand for something different, and this difference must be relevant to its users. Most importantly, this difference and relevance must be simple to understand. The most successful brands today are based on ideas that are not just different and relevant, but simple.”
This book shows the branding strategies of major global corporations and how they transformed social behaviour through branding their business ideas. This is the kind of thinking that our political power forces that so grip this nation must adopt, now.
Our political leaders fail to inspire our nation. We live divided, and we sink in our social being into a sad society suffering nearly 40 percent chronic poverty, where the rich build gated communities to keep out the desperate poor who pillage and plunder public spaces.
Our political forces could re-brand themselves in the public imagination to inspire the nation with their messages, ideas and programs to advance the society into a developed nation.
Thus, the 2011 elections could well be a popular platform for gifted leaders to inspire the nation with messages of outstanding excellence and dynamic possibilities.
Were we to have such an election instead of the acrimonious one that fosters those old emotional triggers of divisions, we would leap ahead as a society, inspired and ready to take our place among the community of developed 21st century nations. “The objective of bringing a brand to life is to turn concept into reality,” Adamson says in his book.
So must these tired, old political power forces bring the nation alive by branding this concept of a One People, One Nation, One Destiny society, rather than rehash the old divide and conquer mentality of our colonial past.
All it takes is for one leader to stand up and inspire us with a dynamic message, through re-branding our worn-out political power centres.
This writer can be contacted at [email protected]
